Discovering Spatial Correlations between Earth Observations in Global Atmospheric State Estimation by using Adaptive Graph Structure Learning
Existing global atmospheric state estimation methods inadequately model spatial correlations between Earth observations and atmospheric fields. Method: We propose an adaptive spatiotemporal graph neural network (STGNN) framework that introduces an edge-sampling mechanism jointly guided by node-degree adaptivity and spatial-distance constraints to mitigate information loss and over-smoothing in graph learning; further, it jointly models meteorological observations and numerical weather prediction (NWP) gridded data to explicitly capture dynamic spatiotemporal dependencies. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on real-world observational data across East Asia, our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art STGNN approaches—particularly in regions with sharp atmospheric transitions (e.g., frontal zones and typhoons), where forecast accuracy improves markedly. The framework establishes a new, interpretable, and robust paradigm for high-resolution atmospheric state estimation.